Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers

Google Cloud Platform brings you lots of ways to store, access and archive your data, including Google Cloud Storage, DataStore and BigQuery. In some cases, there’s a need to be able to access a POSIX compatible shared file system across a fleet of your cloud instances. To support these use cases with a robust scale out and scale up solution, Google Cloud Platform and Red Hat are proud to announce the availability of Red Hat Gluster Storage on Google Compute Engine.

Red Hat Gluster Storage offers a highly available and fault tolerant shared file system that can scale vertically and horizontally. Red Hat Gluster Storage makes use of compute instances with disks attached in order to provide a distributed, scale-out file system. Users of Red Hat Gluster Storage on GCE can take advantage of the performance, scalability and flexibility of our Persistent Disks.

Disks used for your Red Hat Gluster Storage installation can be chosen based on various performance and cost tradeoffs. For example, you can choose to use standard Persistent Disks for data that does not require high I/O throughput or use the more performant SSD Persistent Disks for your IOPS hungry workloads, such as media rendering. Each node in your cluster can leverage disks of up to 64TB in size and with up to 15,000 IOPS.

In order to protect mission critical data, Red Hat Gluster Storage enables users to synchronously replicate their files across multiple zones in the same region while at the same time asynchronously replicating them to a separate region for disaster recovery. In the example architecture below, we’re using us-east1-b as our primary zone with a hot standby in us-east1-c:

For more information on getting started with Red Hat Gluster Storage on GCE click here.